Mike Vouri
Mike Vouri: Miss Me’s Last Day
Captain Frank Birchak scowled as we approached the province chief’s headquarters buildings in Cao Lanh, just down the street from Special Forces Camp B-43. I was 15 minutes late getting to the jeep, waylaid by a nasty case of the trots. Worst of all, he’d had to kick…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Kind Hearts at Trail’s End
The skies had cleared, save for tufts of clouds scudding overhead and stacking in the distance over the rooftops of Gilsland as I left The Hollies-on-the-Wall B&B for the next leg of my hike, which would end at Lanercost, six miles ahead. I had slipped a…
A Christmas Story: The Cock Fight – December 25, 1968
We motored out of Cao Lanh, up country, in the opposite direction from the Tanh Tich airstrip road, past the Esso station and the movie theater, threading the fuel barrels that slowed traffic in front of the Army’s 44th Special Zone compound, skirting the once fine…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Ditches and Dung to the Hollies
Author’s note: I return to the Hadrian’s Wall path, c. 2023 and the second to the last leg of my return trek. July 11, Gilsland and Lanercost For whatever reason I neglected to work on my daily journal during my stay at the Hollies-on-the-Wall B&B in Gilsland and…
Mike Vouri: The World Turned Upside Down (Remembering Pearl Harbor)
Originally posted 12/07/2023 – My maternal uncle, Bob Bentley, was a third-class machinist’s mate on the battleship U.S.S. Oklahoma in 1941. Early in the year he sent my mother a postcard from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where the fleet had been moved the summer before to…
Mike Vouri: Dinner Mints
It was Thanksgiving Day 1968 in the Mekong Delta. My pilot, Capt. Jerry Hare, and I left Special Forces Camp B-43 under a lowering sky, pleased with our good fortune and mouths watering at the prospect of Thanksgiving dinner at Binh Thuy Air Base. It was to be a…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: “It’s such a comfort to take the bus…”
Author’s note: I abandoned the San Juan Islander series about my 2023 hike on the Hadrian’s Wall path midway through to write about local history, public lands and a more immediate 2024 return to the path. That one included a tramp through bogs and drenching rain…
Mike Vouri: Tracking the Big Five: “So Many Raindrops” – Part V
4/5 Morning Rain slashed and pounded our tent roof all night and inundated the savanna beyond the glass doors that overlook the Kalahari’s Korannaberg mountains, enveloped by a thick, dirty gray fog. My sister Denise and I shuffled from our lodgings on the Tswalu…
Mike Vouri: Tracking the Big Five: There’s No Hurry in the Kalahari – Part IV
4/1/25 Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, Loapi Camp, Northern Cape My sister Denise and I touched down at Tswalu on a Tuesday afternoon aboard a Beechcraft Super King Air 350, after weaving above and below, within and without, the stack of thunderheads that gathered above the…
Mike Vouri: Tracking the Big Five 3 – Part III
March 30, Londolozi Private Game Reserve, Bushbuck Ridge, South Africa Some of the most unforgettable memories we cherish are those we’ve made traveling with our families—shared experiences that have forged a bond that lasts a lifetime. For my sister Denise and me,…
Mike Vouri: Tracking the Big Five and Other Enchantments – Part II
March 27 Londolozi, Bushbuck Ridge, Greater Limpopo Basin, South Africa Woke up at 5 a.m. for our second day of game driving at the Londolozi Private Game Reserve. The forecast was rain, and it did not disappoint, though it was more mist than precipitation and I soon…
Mike Vouri: Tracking the Big Five and Other Enchantments – Part I
March 25 Londolozi Game Reserve, Bushbuck Ridge, SA We arrived at the Londolozi Private Game Reserve after two and a half hours stuffed in the pencil-thin fuselage of an Embraer 190 regional jet. Thank goodness I went light on the coffee and limited myself to a single…
Mike Vouri: Finding Madeba: One Degree of Separation with Christo Brand
“I want to live without fear. You have always been afraid of us. And fear has made you an unjust and brutal people.” —Nelson Mandela, Robben Island, Off Cape Town, March 20, 2025 – I did not know how to put into words my second day in Cape Town after we boarded…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Bebba’s Fort, Aidan’s Beam and Uhtred Face-to-Face
“Destiny is all!” So I said to myself as we rolled downhill from the A1 expressway to the coastal village of Bamburgh, a mere five miles south of Scotland. Soon, I would enter the massive castle dominating the horizon, thereby fulfilling the quest of a…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Parting the Waters on Lindisfarne
One of the indelible film memories of my childhood was the 1959 epic, “The Vikings,” starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee’s dad and mom). Accompanied by blasts of French horn and Valkyrie choruses throughout, the most terrifying moment comes…
On Hadrian’s Wall: From Crags to Sunday Roast
“I hope my rain gear works.” The thought crossed my mind that morning as I watched wiper blades, as long and spindly as trekking poles, sweep the day’s first raindrops from the windshield of the AD122 bus motoring along the B6318 highway that runs along the Hadrian’s…
Mike Vouri: Public Lands: A Question of Values
The advent of fall weather has resulted in the classic rain shadow the past few days, best seen from American Camp. I photographed several views (offered here) looking south from the old county road trail and the redoubt to the Olympics Mountains, hiding beneath a…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Sewingshield Crags
It was five years in the making. I finally hiked the Hadrian’s Wall path from Housesteads Fort to Chollerford, ascending Sewingshields Crags and then dropping to the moors that lead to Chesters Fort on the River North Tyne. The guidebooks and Google maps say it is…
Mike Vouri: Hiking the York City Walls
This morning, I was determined to walk York’s city wall, which I can view in the distance from my hotel room window, betwixt the mechanicals on the roof of the adjoining building and the hotel’s Victorian façade. The York City Walls date to the 13th century when they…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Housesteads to Vindolanda
It was the morning of Day Four of my second trek on the Hadrian’s Wall path. A decisive moment was at hand. Should I continue the four miles to Once Brewed at the far end of the valley below, where vehicular traffic hissed in both directions on the B6318? Or follow my…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: A Great Tit and Shearing Sheep
It was by far the fattest great tit I’d ever seen. But in truth, it is the only one I’ve ever seen. Lest you misunderstand, I’m talking about what the British call a “garden bird.” And this little guy possessed a record girth thanks to his benefactor in the electric…
Mike Vouri: The General and Being Unstuck in Time
Sometimes I become unstuck in time, so to speak. Very much like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in the novel Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The book is an autobiographical science fiction piece in which Billy, the central character, becomes unstuck in time and…
Mike Vouri: The Mustache
March 29 was Vietnam Veterans Day I was surprised to learn on the dawning of that day. Whoa, got me there. Thought about it for a while. What could I come up with here about my experience there 1968-69 in the Mekong Delta? And then I remembered the photograph albums…
Mike Vouri: Saints, Scoundrels and the Pig War: A Visit to Durham, England
I can give a 10-minute account (or more) of San Juan Island’s famous Pig War almost anywhere, but I never thought it would be in Durham, England on the day the university of the same name held commencement. I had spotted Durham Cathedral a couple of days…
Mike Vouri: The Photograph on the Vanity
While my mother lay dying at 96 last December, a visiting hospice nurse studied the family photos on my parents’ bedroom wall. They were the usual thing: photos of my sister and me as small children, my parents at their 1945 wedding and in later years. And tucked into…
Mike Vouri: The Real Thing: October 1973
Author’s note: The following story first appeared in a different form in the November 1977 edition of Klipsun , a student publication of Western Washington University, for which I was a writer and production manager. I have cleaned up the dates as well as some florid…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall 2023: Hobbling from the Heavenfield
The following is the third installment chronicling my second journey along the Hadrian’s Wall path this past summer. The names have not been changed to protect the innocent. The Chesters bridge abutment. July 8 Woke up at 3:30 am that Saturday, possibly because it…
Mike Vouri: Lambs and Lions: A Day with the Romans in Corbridge
What a day! And it all began at 3 a.m., when a contingent of woolly fugitives escaped the fields surrounding the bed and breakfast where I was staying to feed on the garden…directly below my window. Talk about counting sheep. But in the end these were poor little…
Mike Vouri: Hadrian’s Wall return
I finished my second day on the Hadrian’s Wall path this afternoon, though it was a bit abbreviated due to that ankle I rolled the other day. Taking it slowly has its benefits, though. You literally smell the flowers, in addition to sucking in every pollen known to…
Mike Vouri: Walking Through History: The Frazer Homestead Trail
My setter Iris and I hiked the Frazer-Homestead trail recently at American Camp for the first time together in more than a year. We started out on the South Beach trail, but a bitter southeast wind off the Strait of Juan de Fuca turned us back moments after we broke…
Mike Vouri: Black Ice, White Christmas and the Kindness of Strangers
I made it home for the holidays on San Juan Island after a tough week in the San Francisco Bay Area and a journey that seemed right out of the film, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.” For awhile there, I thought the fates were surely against me as obstacles, generated…
Mike Vouri: The ghost on my shoulder: Remembering Larry
Wars begin where you will, but they do not end where you please. — Machiavelli I recently listened from start to finish to Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam, a Vietnam memoir by a former acquaintance of mine, Larry Heinemann, now deceased. Normally I would…
Mike Vouri: The Pig War’s Last Victim: Free Land and the Heartbreak of Alexander McKenzie
Alexander McKenzie peered through the loopholes of his blockhouse prison and watched as the weekly steamer maneuvered in the shallow bay before tying up at the dock of the Royal Marine Camp on San Juan Island. Peace between Great Britain and the United States had…
Mike Vouri: Dancing the Night Away on San Juan Island
“Say Herman, you want to get a pair of those fine dancing pumps at the Blue Front store before the next dance? Like everything else they are sold away down at the Blue Front.” There was a time here in the 1890s when, after dark, the fields surrounding the old…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Bowness-on-Solway
July 17 Bowness on Solway We made it. Our journey along the Hadrian’s Wall path ended at about noon, following a final push into a west wind that plastered our clothing to our bodies and pelted us with raindrops that stung like pea gravel. It was only the second…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Gods, Cows and Walltown
As we sat on a picnic table at the Cawfield Crags park, a little more than halfway along the Hadrian’s Wall path, I thought about what I would be doing back home on San Juan Island after hiking more than six miles. A stone inset ladder stile gives on to the Hadrian’s…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Into the West
After a day of hiking and sightseeing along Hadrian’s Wall, Jerry and I sat on the lawn in front of the Vindolanda visitor center and waited for our gear to dry. We had just emerged from a fierce rain squall before reaching this gem among the ruins of Roman Britain….
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: The Hard (Best) Part
July 12 Once Brewed (Vindolanda) As I write this in our room at the Vallum Lodge, the sheep are bleating plaintively several pitches above the steady hiss of the B6318 highway, which passes directly in front of the lodge. I was tempted to go out to see what was going…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Bridge Over Ancient Waters
I swayed like a drunk engaged on a balance beam as I skirted thorny foliage encroaching on a narrow sidewalk that runs along England’s A6079 highway. I should have been facing the cars and monster trucks that seemed about to flatten me, but there was no path or even a…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: Romans Didn’t Need Smart Phones
Since Covid-19 struck last year we have become accustomed to virtual experiences such as museum tours, town council meetings, inaugural events and even the World Series. But imagine my surprise when I learned via Facebook that I could earn a Hadrian’s Wall path medal…
Mike Vouri: On Hadrian’s Wall: A Hike Across England
There was a moment when hiking in northern England that I ascended a bare hillside fringed by conifers and flashed instantly to Mt. Finlayson on San Juan Island. Except for the sheep scattering ahead and piles of dung, it was much like a local trail following a…
Mike Vouri: Tootle-loo: Bugler Hughes and the Last Post for George Bazalgette on San Juan Island
Captain George Bazalgette must have jumped out of his chair when he heard the bugle call to Christmas dinner at American Camp. Every bugler had his signature, and the style was unmistakable. That was his bugler, George Hughes. The same George Hughes who had deserted…
Mike Vouri: Isla y Archipelago de San Juan: A Spanish Expedition
Farewell and adieu unto you Spanish ladies Farewell and adieu to you ladies of Spain For we’ve received orders for to sail for old England But we hope very soon we shall see you again Seventeen year-old Frances Trevor Barkley knew something was up by the…
Mike Vouri: A Shot Not in the Dark: Tribune’s cannonball
It’s not every day that you arrive at the office and find a rusty, mud-caked cannonball on your desk. That’s what happened in 2002 after my colleague, Park Ranger Ron Heeren, encountered a pair of teenagers lugging a 32-pound solid shot from Old Town Lagoon on Griffin…
Mike Vouri: The Military Road
The heat was already stifling at 11 a.m. in late July 2006 when I encountered four Canadian reenactor colleagues taking a breather in the shade at the corner of Little and Douglas roads. Clad in the scarlet and blue wool uniforms of the mid-19th century Royal Marines,…
Mike Vouri: The Little Saw Mill That Could
It is not difficult to find historical links between San Juan Island and Bellingham Bay, from the Lummi Nation, whose ancestors wintered here over thousands of years, to the Spanish, British and finally American explorers who named (and changed the names) of every…
Mike Vouri: South Beach trail’s origin story
American Camp’s South Beach trail is as ancient and practical as it is spectacular. Its beeline route from the parade ground to the springs above Salmon Banks Road—precisely two miles there and back— has carried hunter-gatherers, shepherds and their flocks, and…
Mike Vouri: The Delacombes at English Camp
Captain William Addis Delacombe of the Royal Marines arrived on San Juan Island in April 1867 to assume command of the Royal Marine garrison. His predecessor, Captain George Bazalgette, had run afoul of his government after discovering a deserter—his bugler of six…